Boko Haram Survival Outweighs Nigeria Vote Delay
Joseph, 30, lives with her four children and about 6,000 other people displaced by attacks by the Islamist militant group Boko Haram at a camp in Yola, capital of the northeastern state of Adamawa.
Joseph, 30, lives with her four children and about 6,000 other people displaced by attacks by the Islamist militant group Boko Haram at a camp in Yola, capital of the northeastern state of Adamawa.
She fled her village of Bazza when, during a church service, she heard explosions. “I didn’t carry anything, I just ran with my children and my life,” she said in an interview outside a concrete room she shares with other women.
When she asked electoral officials how she could cast her ballot, they said she would have to pick up her biometric voter’s card in the city of Maiduguri, about 400 kilometers (250 miles) to the north where her husband Peter was killed last year. “You want to kill me?” she recalled replying. “You’re telling me to go to Maiduguri by road when Boko Haram is everywhere?”
Joseph is one of about 1.5 million people who’ve been forced to flee their homes as Boko Haram presses its six-year campaign to establish a self-styled caliphate in the northeast of Africa’s most populous nation. The national security adviser’s office cited the disruption the war has caused in its push for a postponement of the elections for six weeks to March 28. Joseph said she and other victims of the violence have little confidence in the government.
“Our main problem is that we don’t know what our government is doing,” said Joseph, wearing a olive-green flowing garment known as a hijab. “Whether our president is dead alive, we don’t know. Because we don’t know what he is doing for us.”
